A year in now, the situation in CA is mixed. The state system was reasonable, given it was California, but to have 500-something towns and counties come up with their own rules, sometimes just as complicated, turns the ability to do business into a joke. Those with an infinite amount of money and lawyers are clearly up and running just fine, but the many thousands of "little people" are still trying to navigate the licensing systems. Meanwhile,...
I'm back in Yuma for a change of scenery and access to better food. Quartzsite eateries are very, very mundane. As usual I'm at the VFW/BLM spot, but this time the WINS (an RV travel club) are here, nearly filling the place up. Every year I run into them at least once as we have similar routes in the SW. The hassle is that I have my solar panels set up for a direction that I couldn't match because of space. Extra work. The Trump shutdown has...
I'm sitting on BLM land right now. The check-in station is closed, but the dump and water stations are open, though not monitored. So it's basically business-as-usual, very low impact. These functions are staffed by unpaid volunteers, but they cannot "work" anyway during the shutdown. No savings here. An observation: Over the last month I've seen BLM enforcement just once. Today I've seen them 5 times. This may be the usual gov't theater when...
Vermont is a legal state, but it does not have a regulated commercial market. They are considering state control of a marketplace, but requested a committee provide input to the decision makers. The committee recommended that the issue of detecting impaired driving be addressed first and foremost before proceeding. My note to Vermont: Over 30 states, hundreds of counties, thousands of communities, several nations, and all Canadian provinces have...
After so many years of successful legalization in the West, I'm baffled by the approaches seen in the East: New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo: "We will end the disproportionate criminalization of one race over another by regulating, legalizing and taxing the adult use of recreational marijuana." (December 17, 2018). New Hampshire, Governor Chris Sununu (from Weed News): "Gov. Chris Sununu came out swinging against the effort to legalize marijuana...
Hemp is cannabis, the same plant that we argue about called marijuana. Like all plants, in various degrees, cannabis has a rich enough genome to adapt to different environments. The Farm Bill legalizes hemp throughout the US, provided it contains less than .3% THC. That makes it a shitty smoke, but it's great for seed oil and fiber. When it was made illegal in the 70's along with it's cousin marijuana, the production and marketing facilities...
The people of Oklahoma passed an initiative enabling medical marijuana. The state immediately went to work to implement it, the law was a good one, and they're coming online with little fuss or muss. They are out of the gate with 742 medical marijuana dispensaries licensed. A dispensary is much like a store, but also grows cannabis. Retail stores in other states do not need to grow, and in Washington they cannot. Still, dispensaries have a sign...
Tilting my panels is a chore I don't like, but when the daylight hours are shortened, and the sun drops towards the horizon, I have no choice to keep my batteries charged up. They're tilted now, just in time for a couple of days of cloud cover. My panels are back to working like they should. Assuming I'm using propane for fridge, heat, and hot water, my laptop computer is the biggest draw on my batteries. But, this year I acquired a Nintendo...